Carl-Richard

Yes. Is ain't ought.

Just distinguish between personal dissociative complexes ("minds") and boundless consciousness. It's so easy.

They seek deactivation of the Default Mode Network in their own limited ways.

They seek deactivation of the Default Mode Network in their own limited ways, the ways they were brought up to do, conditioned, what they believe is the best thing to do, but if they were given a taste of what spirituality does, they might capitulate to it completely or fear it for its intensity and for threatening their sense of limited identity and stability. It's a constant tug-of-war between what is desired the most (expansion) and what is feared of being lost (contraction). The common man is lost in the middle, being ruled by both, not capitulating to pure expansion. That's the truth of suffering, attachment, dukkha, samsara, being reborn as a fearing ego moment to moment. But it's not just the common man. It's every spiritual seeker up until the moment of letting go of everything they fear, and even everything they desire, but pure desire.

Now you're making the mistake of solipsism turned out on the world instead of turned in towards yourself, as Michael James put it (the person doing the Ramana Maharshi Q&A). Once you use solipsism to describe relationships out in the world, relationships between people, between you as a dream character and other dream characters, you are no longer talking about Ramana's solipsism. Ramana's solipsism is the one dreamer taking on the dream character(s) as an illusion in its own imagination. The relationship between the dreamer and the dream characters is not spatial, not local, not present in time, only present through omniscience, pure knowing, pure being of everything that exists. Once you start talking about hidden things, of things being present in space or being not present in space, of where things are on the screen of perception or where they are not — once you start to question the dreamer's complete omniscience — you are in conceptual thinking, belief, fantastical delusion. What Ramana wanted to tell you is that your grandma is an illusion, and so are you.

@Entrepreneur What if we could predict what everybody values the most based on an inverse activation of the Default Mode Network, and that the end goal of spiritual practice is the pinnacle of that?

And you?

Yup. MMO analogies are the way to teach zoomers. Tom Campbell was 20 years early.

Denying other, denying multiplicity, denying maya, is cool and all, but as Ramana Maharshi would have said, deny it all the way. Yourself as a person in the dream, that is also maya. If it's possible for you as a person in the dream to exist, it's possible for others in the dream to exist.

Death of the self means you're literally dying every single moment of your existence.

Solipsism is not heavy. Death of the self is heavy.

The person you think yourself to be in the dream: the personal. The dreamer: transpersonal.

The distinction between personal and transpersonal is more illusive than the distinction between spiritual ego and spirituality for some.

Dictatee.

Yes. Yes.

What do you lay in the word "self-transcendence"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_Z

I've just skimmed through parts of it but I find the writing style awful and repetitive. Hanzi Freinacht "The Listening Society" is a step up from even Wilber.

@Rilles 👀 Hello

You can pursue a goal without strictly needing the goal. You can pursue it because it's desirable, not because you need it necessarily. But also, neediness seems like an extreme kind of expression of a need. You can have a milder expression that could not be classified as needy and still have a need associated with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needy https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/neediness If you lack the self-assurance and character to not display a behavior indicative of extreme privation, that you don't have a sense of balance and stability within yourself or are able to handle shifting outcomes without breaking down into a non-functional mess, that means you're being needy.

It's an attitude of non-attachment. You pursue it but you accept whatever that happens and are ok without it. Acceptance is a core feature in the psychological concept cognitive flexibility.

Meaning, autonomy and being. Then comes "physical health" (optimized diet, exercise, sleep, etc.). Then comes social health. If meaning, autonomy and being collapses, that's death. An organism that acts in accordance with its impetus, follows its drives, is in tune with its capabilities, lives. Nourishment comes secondary to that. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The process was I noticed a tension when focusing on the speaker/powerpoint in the lecture. Like I was trying to force my attention to project in this piecemeal and inelegant way. So when I noticed this tension, I let it dissolve. Even this subtle act of perception did have a physical manifestation, as a slight tightness in the visual apparatus. And when this dissolved, things notably became calmer, and then time stopped and the rest of the story unfolded. Some mentalist might say "you simply let go of your attachment to focus on the lecture", but even attachment has physical correlates, albeit subtle ones (what we call "behavioral" patterns), where tension in the body is one example.

This song is so feelgood, like butterflies in my entire body. It's so short:

My first awakening (which happened very quickly during my 3rd meditation) probably only happened that quickly because it was preceded by a week of intense active mindfulness practice (up in the Norwegian mountains 😎, true mystic), which included not as much body scanning as overall awareness of movement (although the distinction kind of evaporates at some point). But the meditation where the awakening happened included body scanning (and then vipassana, which also has a body awareness aspect).